There was a point in our musical development where our live shows were all energy and chaos, and I felt like I'd inadvertently unleashed the wrath of Kali upon the world of punk.

One night while I was onstage, I noticed that the landscape was changing before my eyes. As I looked out into the audience, I could see that the once quirky men and women artists who prized originality above all else were being replaced by a belligerent, male-dominated mob who became anonymous, camouflaged by their homogeneous appearance. I didn't mind the belligerent part; in fact playing for a belligerent group of individuals can be quite satisfying. What I didn't like was the sameness. In the past, audiences were full of men and women in wildly colored plumage; now the black leather jacket was emerging as the uniform of the new regime.

Alice Bag, whose name was Anglicized from Alicia in elementary school, and whose last name is a moniker from her late 70s punk band The Bags, shares her coming-of-age story in short, episodic chapters, that are not unlike punk songs. They're hard and fast and sometimes leave you wanting to slam into something. The essays are not polished, a characteristic that takes nothing away, and adds to their authenticity.

A history of the hey day of riot grrrl, Girls to the Front reads more like a biography of the movement, like a biography of an ex-lover on whom the author has some distance but still identifies with to a large extent. It is a loving, but not uncritical portrait of the rise of riot grrrl and its best known players. A professional (and very talented) writer, Sara Marcus includes herself only in the introduction and briefly in the epilogue. Given my own bias toward personal narratives and the every grrrl, I might have liked a little more about Sara's experiences and adventures, but I still found the book to be educational, inspiring, compelling, and enraging--in a good way.

...I asked the woman who worked there about the music she was playing. She said it was "women's music"--music by, for, and about lesbians--and played me a couple of songs from the most popular records. I didn't like anything. I kept waiting for it to start. It wasn't punk, and I was depressed about my chances of ever achieving real lesbian consciousness. Finally, I bought a Holly Near record just to stop feeling stupid.

There were T-shirts on the wall behind the desk, like a Dykes on Bikes shirt which, I swear, almost weep right there in the store. At the last minute, I asked the woman to throw in a purple Fesbian-Leminist T-shirt. I clutched the paper bag between my knees on the motorcycle seat in front of me.

I put on my T-shirt when I got home and wandered around the apartment listening to Holly Near. Todd wasn't there, and I turned it way up, hoping to make it sound better. I played it at 78rpm and tried to pogo to it. It just didn't work. p. 33-34

The book starts out with Melany, a seventeen-year-old punk sleeping with a woman for the first time. You travel with her as she overcomes her shyness about her sexuality, her trying to reconcile punk with the hippie and new age lesbian scene, getting dumped, sleeping with her roommate, doing civil disobedience in an ACT UP era protest, and finally falling in love with the right person.

Zines are self-published, but the motivation behind their publication is different than that driving many vanity press and chapbook authors. The principles of anarchism and punk rock community are fundamental to zines, not just as the cultures that birthed them in their current incarnation, but also as what separates them from other self-publications. By collecting and preserving zines, the non-music primary sources of punk rock, librarians are documenting these movements in the participants’ own voices—the voices of those too young, too politically radical, too crusty, and/or too bad mannered to appeal to the corporate media. It is important to note that zine producers are not only people who have been relegated to the margins but also people who have chosen to claim the margins. In contrast to most writers, many zine producers might choose to reject an offer from corporate publishing house. Why let someone else control what you can say, when you can do it yourself? This presentation will address the politics and cultural motivations of zine publication and contrast them with other types of self-publication. Focusing specifically on materials from Barnard College’s open-stack zine collection that uses riot grrrl and other third wave feminist zines to enhance its research-oriented Women’s Studies book collection, this paper will go on to explore why zines belong in established library collections.

Part of "Grrrls in the Library: the Collections and Preservation of Feminist Zines" panel.